Category 6 Hurricane
That's because we don't have them any more.
Kind of, Buffalo has seen some of the most extreme weather events in their very long history the last 10 years. Between the 2016 and 2022 lake effect snow events that dropped 8 feet in 24 hours and one of the worst blizzards in history. With that said, they are in a unique location where climate change is making the lake effect events more extreme. When the lake is frozen, there is no lake effect. Basically the intensity of lake effect snow events is determined by the difference in water temperature vs 850mb temps. When the lake stays warm and doesn't freeze over it leaves a much bigger window for lake effect events to happen and then with warmer lake temps it increases the amount of snow in these events.
They had gone almost 40 years without an extreme blizzard, something that used to happen a couple times per decade. That means 70% of the population or more wasn't old enough to drive the last time there was a high end blizzard. Of the other 30%, it wasn't exactly fresh on their mind or maybe they misattributed improvements in technology and infrastructure to the lack of severe blizzard events. So when that blizzard struck, it caught everyone by surprise (except me of course :) ). The models clearly showed it, Buffalo had just gone through the record breaking lake effect event and the snowfall forecast for the blizzard was half as much snow (still 3-4 feet). The media was preoccupied with Chicago and Christmas, there was no hype. I was shocked leading into the event because the models were showing long duration 60mph sustained winds with gusts over 100mph with heavy snow and extreme cold. Reed Timmer and myself were literally the only ones there covering it. We were preparing like we were about to intercept a major hurricane and couldn't believe how casual everyone was being about it. The bravado of the people in Buffalo was pretty crazy. The "we are from Buffalo, this is normal" attitude leading up to the blizzard was really obvious. Reed was even catching hell on social media for "hyping" the event. I can't argue that he does hype some events but it was absolutely warranted in this case and he was catching hell.
So when the blizzard did strike, the city was as paralyzed as I have ever seen any city from a disaster. It took a week before people could drive, the airport was closed for 8 days straight. People were looting for basic supplies like food and water because everything was shut down. There were drifts 40 feet tall. The roads looked like someone pressed a button and everything was frozen in time with cars littering every road abandoned. Plows couldn't plow because they lost so much control of the roads the snow got too deep and plows were getting stuck. I have video of a huge front end loader with chains even getting stuck. Even where it wasn't too deep cars were blocking the road so it couldn't be plowed and the cars were perfect spots for drifts to set up. They had to remove thousands of cars with heavy duty forklifts just to be able to start clearing the roads. I pulled out fire trucks trying to respond that were stuck only for them to get stuck again 100 yards down the road. At one point I pulled out a fire fighter on a snow mobile that got buried in a drift. Reed and I rescued a group of 3 just 30 feet from the hotel lobby. They didn't know if they were 30 feet from the hotel lobby or on the moon. It's the same thing when you can't see the ground let alone surroundings. The group of 3 was a couple that had rescued another lady. I had rented a diesel pickup truck and was able to get around longer than most but at one point it took me 4 hours to get 11 miles. I was driving blind at 1-2mph feeling for plow lines and using GPS to get closer to the city where buildings would at least block the wind to allow brief visibility in places. Once at the hotel everything was on foot and even then it was to a very area so we would not get lost. The next day we were still firmly in an intense blizzard but it let up enough to where I could drive around about a square mile area downtown. Reed and I used our rental vehicle to blast drifts just to allow us to get around that 1 square mile area. If one of us got stuck the other would pull out. Thankfully I had a heavy duty tow rope. We picked up homeless people, local residents, tourists and people just traveling through that were stranded, some had extreme frostbite. We picked up cops, firefighters and EMT's that were stranded and couldn't even get rescued by their own. All that bravado was replaced by humility really quick.
My point is that while we haven't had some of these extreme winters, we are still seeing these extreme winter events, some of which have been made worse by climate change. When these extreme winter events happen now it is catching everyone by surprise. So what happens if we have a truly extreme winter? The last two winters we had quick bursts of what we consider extreme or record breaking cold. It got down into the single digits in north Louisiana and central MS. This "record breaking cold" was not even close to record breaking. The all time lows in Louisiana and MS are -16 and -19. So what we are calling extreme cold now is 20 degrees warmer than record levels. 20 degree differences is the difference between record cold for Arkansas and Montana. It's a huge shift. So if we were to get a truly record breaking cold event in the mid or deep south, it would be catastrophic on levels we can not imagine and far worse than these events would have been 50-100 years ago. Imagine a circumstance in which every house over 3 states needs to be replumbed and cities water infrastructure being decimated. The question becomes, is it possible to still get that cold? Looking at the data, particularly in Alaska and it is quite obvious that are odds are becoming much lower. The days in which Alaska hits -60 has become quite rare. However, that data is starting to show that extreme cold is not getting warmer, just occurring less frequently. The data is also showing it is becoming more common to get short bursts of really cold weather in the south even if the average temperature of winter is increasing. So I think we are only slightly less likely to have a 1899 type winter event occur again. While it was extremely rare even before climate change, it will happen again at some point and we'll be completely caught by surprise.